Annual Report

In May 2015, New Music USA hosted two public events. The first was a NewMusicBox LIVE showcase featuring talks and performances from three very different musical creators: saxophonist/sound experimentalist Matana Roberts, Grammy and Grawemeyer Award-winning composer Joan Tower, and polystylistic singer/songwriter Gabriel Kahane. The event, which was free and open to the general public, took place at SubCulture, a unique New York City music venue that combines the best qualities of a club and a concert hall. We returned to SubCulture for a benefit cocktail party, dinner, and concert featuring performances by a broad range of New Music USA Project Grant recipients: 2014 MacArthur fellow Steve Coleman; PRISM Saxophone Quartet with Rudresh Mahanthappa; flute/piano duo RighteousGIRLS performing works by Andy Akiho and Pascal Le Boeuf; and the Wet Ink Ensemble. (The entire NewMusicBox LIVE showcase will be posted to NewMusicBox in August 2015.)

Over the past year, 116 different new music projects received a total of $571,300 through New Music USA’s Project Grants which support concerts and recordings, as well as dance, film, theater, opera, and more—all involving contemporary music as an essential element. At the end of June 2015, New Music USA announced the recipients of its fourth round of Project Grants awards; 54 projects were awarded grants totaling $287,050. In January 2015, an additional 62 projects were awarded grants totaling $284,250 in the third round of Project Grants awards. In response to feedback from artists who were surveyed last summer following the two inaugural rounds of the program, the third and fourth round grants included a special focus on requests of $3,000 and below. Approximately 65% of the third round awardeesand 44% of the fourth round awardees were in this category. Awarded projects from all four rounds can be discovered, explored, and followed by the public via media-rich project pages (www.newmusicusa.org/featured-projects/).

Through Music Alive, New Music USA’s partnership with the League of American Orchestras, five orchestras were able to support composer residencies: the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (Gabriela Lena Frank); the Seattle Symphony (Trimpin); Pacific Symphony (Narong Prangcharoen); Dayton Performing Arts Alliance (Stella Sung); and the Albany Symphony Orchestra (Sleeping Giant, a collective comprising six composers— Timothy Andres, Christopher Cerrone, Jacob Cooper, Ted Hearne, Robert Honstein, and Andrew Norman). Also of note, Julia Wolfe’s oratorio Anthracite Fields, which was commissioned through our Commissioning Music/USA program in 2011, was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music.

Finally, New Music USA has moved offices as of April 13, 2015. We are still in Lower Manhattan’s historic Financial District, but we are now at 90 Broad Street, a 25-floor office building with an ornate Beaux-Arts lobby that was built in 1930.

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